After arriving in Herat, Afghanistan, on 23 November 1971, my plan to drive on to India came to a halt because of the war between Pakistan and India. Stranded in Kabul, I read the Pakistan Embassy’s news bulletin daily to follow the conflict. My visit to Ghazni that winter left a vivid impression on me: from my freezing hotel room I heard the howling of wolves in the night, and the following morning I marvelled at the terra-cotta tile decoration of the two Victory Towers, each standing over forty metres high. These monuments were raised in the 12th century by the Sultans Mas’ud III and his son Bahram Shah, the last of the Ghaznavid rulers, to commemorate their army’s victories.
Seeking a milder climate than wintery Kabul, I spent several weeks in the lowlands of Jalalabad, east of the Kabul gorge, lodging at the Monopoly Club and later the Nangarhar Hotel (the Club, planning a private party with spirits, politely asked me, a foreign observer, to leave). On Christmas Eve 1971 I watched a spectacular sunset, its hues of pink slowly fading over the distant Hindu Kush. My curiosity led me to enter the royal winter palace of Baghi-Chahi illegally through an open back door, only to leave foolishly through the main front gate, where a guardian stopped me and I found myself surrounded by a group of soldiers in ill-fitting uniforms. Feigning ignorance, I asked an English-speaking officer, “Is this a hotel?” He shook his head in consternation and sent me on my way.
Forty kilometres outside Jalalabad, in December 1971, I visited a model farm run by Russian experts who were breeding cattle, where an excellent irrigation system had transformed the arid land into lush green dotted with all sorts of fruit trees, a reminder that Afghanistan’s low rainfall demands artificial irrigation for agriculture. Travel itself was an adventure: I once took the local bus from Jalalabad to Kabul for 30 Afs, and the return journey took four hours as the driver sped over every bump in the winding road. It was a ghastly journey, and when the bus paused at a chaikhana for evening prayers, the scene by the roadside was memorably chaotic, with one passenger being sick into the water ditch while others washed their face and feet downstream and a row of men crouched to relieve themselves. What a scene!